Marvelicious

That is spot-on what works for me. Warm soapy water has given me the best results with a PEI plate. The chamber heat soak is also big for these troublesome filaments. My printing gear lives in a closet and for trouble prints, I will crank up the bed, and my filament dryer for a half-hour or so to get reliable chamber temps.

I've pretty much been running on the binary theory with the AMS sensor: anything but a 1 is too high. I guess I'm glad I didn't waste any money on those digital jobbies. I wonder if the old school analog style are better?

I feel like it's finally at the point where the issues are minor enough that I have the patience to deal with them. I've been using the release candidates for the last couple of weeks and mostly it comes down to remembering to save regularly and occasionally having to shut it down and restart. Honestly, some of the commercial solutions aren't drastically better in that respect!

I think anyone coming from a place where they have a ton of experience in SolidWorks or Fusion might want to hold out a little longer, though it's definitely worth a try. If you're coming from a place where you have to learn a new program anyway, you might as well learn the free option that will only continue to improve.

MangoJellySolutions on YouTube is really good.

This is a very good joke and deserves more upvotes, but I only have one to give.

I think my experience is roughly parallel to yours. I bit the bullet and got an X1C and with a couple of exceptions (mostly my own mistakes) it has been largely hassle-free. Having a reliable printer is actually allowing me to tackle the project of rebuilding my Anycubic Predator into the machine I always wished it was. That massive build volume will be great, but I have something I don't have to fiddle with to make the parts.

As for the Bambu/Chinese paranoia, I think it's overstated considering most people here are probably typing their replies on a device thoroughly infiltrated by Apple or Google or both. Do a few prints to make sure everything works properly and switch to Orca Slicer and local network mode if you're concerned.

YM (and your fear of China) MV

Orca and local network mode work pretty well for me.🤷🏼‍♂️

Seriously, grinder first. You can use a better grinder with your Aeropress and French Press l, and you won't waste as much time making bad espresso when you do get a machine.

If you're mechanical, watch Craigslist and marketplace: I once got a broken Rancillio Silvia for free. It needed serious repairs, but I don't have $100 in parts in it and it works perfectly now.

They just announced it a week or two ago, but they're keeping the server up for "a reasonable period" to allow users to migrate. From my understanding, many of their tweaks have been integrated into 1.0 and the team all plans to continue working with FreeCAD and submitting improvements.

I was recently roughly in the same place. I have played around in the past with a few things, but there were reasons I didn't really get into any of them: Fusion360 and their increasingly limited free options, OnShape and their online only thing... so on...

FreeCad has a new release candidate for what they're calling version 1.0, meaning they consider it a mature and functional piece of software. I've been working with it, and yeah... it's not perfect, but it's definitely usable now. I figured if I was going to put all that effort into learning something, I might as well learn something that would always be free.

Yeah, honestly that was at least partially my thought process posting this. I see someone else posted the same video and got a bit more traction as well, which is great: the more eyes on this, the more likely someone chooses to develop it. If someone develops a fork or plugin for various open source slicers, it's usefulness should quickly become obvious and someone with deeper pockets will wind up going after the BS patent. Even as little as a 10% improvement in layer adhesion, if it's reliable and consistent, is a significant upgrade. The old saying about a chain only being as strong as the weakest link comes to mind and layer adhesion is the weakest link in 3d printing.

Whew... that's well presented and I do appreciate it, but I was speaking specifically of filament tuning. One of the things I paid Bambu their premium for is having the machine and baseline slicer profiles dialed in and they kinda do. All that machine calibration stuff is what I got frustrated with when I quit the first time!

I am kicking around the idea of rebuilding my Anycubic Predator with updated... everything, just to have that massive build volume again. It might actually work pretty well with a high flow hotend and klipper firmware.

I'm definitely bookmarking that guide for future reference.